In recent decades the body, its uses and its history, have become a
focus of critical and historical investigation. (1) Still more recently
the study of imaginary bodies that do not entirely correspond to the
"real" body has come into prominence, marking the emergence of
exo-corporeal theory. (2) In the context of early modern studies, we
have seen the combination of the first approach or method--a material
history of the body--with new histories and psychologies of not only the
body, but of bodily fantasies. (3) This current fascination with
corporeal experience and fantasy is in part a response to
Foucault's works, to feminist and gender theory, and, last but not
least, to the technology-induced anxieties of our historical moment. (4)
The ongoing exploration of pre-modern fantasies of the body, its
pleasure or pain, and its real or imagined vulnerabilities sheds light
on the history of sexuality, as well as the transformation and evolution
of our understanding of the mind-body continuum.

Sixteenth-century Venice provides fertile ground for such
investigations. An international trade center, Venice was also the
renowned-or infamous--European capital of the sex trade during the
Renaissance. Partly as a result of its position as a global trade nexus,
Venice was blighted by plagues, recurrent or continuous, and ranging
from the bubonic to the syphilitic. Such scourges were a fact of life at
that time, and not just for Venice, though certain reactions to these
problems might be considered characteristic of and perhaps unique to
that place and time. The literary and artistic talents of that
city--some greater, some lesser--described, at times with astonishing candor, that peculiar mix of sexual desire and terror, of expansiveness
and corporeal vulnerability.

This essay focuses on a paradigmatic expression of a fantastic and
phantasmatic convergence of sex and death manifested in the real-life
poetic combat between two individuals. This combat was performed by
dueling authors, and was witnessed and judged by their drawing room
audience, by the city itself, and ultimately by posterity. The ten-zone,
or poetic battle, featured the courtesan poetess Veronica Franco,
considered the most famous woman in Venice at that time, (5) and Maffio
Venier, Venetian cleric, celebrated vernacular poet, and Franco's
nemesis. This battle took place sometime before the publication of
Franco's collection of poems, the Terze rime, in 1575--most likely
in that same year. (6) The stakes in that battle of the pens were highly
personal. For complicated reasons of his own--among which, we may
surmise, jealousy and misogyny seem to have figured prominently--Venier
sought to destroy Franco's reputation as a courtesan and as a
poet/performer in the literary ridotto, or salon, sponsored by his uncle
Domenico Venier. Domenico, an aristocrat, a patron of Veronica Franco,
and a poet himself, led the informal academy that grew out of a close
circle of patrician friends and included many prominent literati of the
time. (7) Domenico wielded a great deal of cultural influence as an
arbiter of literary taste, and his salon was one of the most important
gathering places for intellectuals in mid-sixteenth century Venice
(Feldman 487; Rosenthal, Honest Courtesan 89). It was before this
prestigious group that Maffio Venier humiliated Franco in several poems,
some of them excruciatingly savage and pornographic. (8)

Franco responded to his scathing attacks through certain poems and
letters, and the very publication of her Terze rime constituted a
rebuttal to Venier's verbal and psychological assault. Her
responses to his poems, described in Capitoli XIII, XVI, and XXIII of
the Rime, disclose her highly personal reactions of shock, pain, and
fury at her attacker. They also contain an ad hominem attack against
Venier's sexuality, more subtle but probably damaging. This
literary conflict, though highly personal, was also quite public, and
those who witnessed the battle between these two poets may also have had
a stake in the outcome.

The tenzone between the two dueling writers has captivated the
feminist imagination in recent years. Margaret Rosenthal's
groundbreaking biography of Franco, The Honest Courtesan; Dacia
Maraini's play, Veronica, meretrice e scrittora; and Marshall
Herskovitz's film Dangerous Beauty all feature, in different yet
compatible ways, portraits of an early-modern sex-worker, creative
writer, and proto-feminist who came out on top of her trade. (9) But, as
Marilyn Migiel and Irene Eibenstein-Alvisi have argued, these and other
recent representations of Franco idealize her life and work to varying
degrees, and assume a literary and social success on Franco's part
that belies the brutal realities of her profession as a courtesan and as
a female poet. They contend that the literary evidence of the Terze rime
reveals a more precarious and violent existence for the courtesan poet
than that which is usually celebrated by critics and historians.

The controversies surrounding Veronica Franco, both in our own time
and in the sixteenth century, are fascinating. This essay shall return
to this much-studied controversy once again, investigating the personal
stakes of those individuals involved, but also, perhaps more
significantly, the cultural stakes in the struggle over Franco's
reputation and, indeed, her body. We know that there were many witnesses
to the conflict between Veronica Franco and Maffio Venier, including the
lover whom she initially suspected and the entire coterie of patrician
spectators at the Ca' Venier. This male circle of literati must
certainly have witnessed the battle with interest, fascination, and
possibly horror. For Maffio's dominant fantasy about Franco,
expressed clearly in his third and final poem, was that she was
afflicted what we would call the tertiary stages of syphilis.
Consequently the assembly that witnessed this battle in the salon
setting of the Ca' Venier and beyond would not have been
disinterested spectators of their unparalleled poetic insult-slinging.
Rather the audience might well have been unnerved by the threat of
syphilis embodied in Maffio's virtual Veronica, as much as by the
assertion of Amazonian subjectivity contained in Franco's poetic
persona. This poetic battle, seemingly circumscribed by the walls of the
Ca' Venier and its circle of members, raised a much larger social
question emblematic of that time and place: namely, what did it mean to
be a public woman in Cinquecento Venice--a woman who, in the case of
Veronica Franco, was both a courtesan and a published poet. Franco was,
in a sense, a living performance of public art--a renowned courtesan
whose body was available to a certain exclusive clientele, a published
author, and a public presence. The degree of her publicity was both
anomalous and unsettling.

Before returning to this power struggle between the courtesan poet
and her adversary, a conduit into the liminal fantasy life of
sixteenth-century Venetians, it is necessary to lay out a key metaphor
of this paper--namely, that of the virtual body. Then, using the concept
of the virtual, and drawing on the syphilitic imaginary of late
sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Europe, this essay will
offer a psycho-corporeal reading of the tenzone, an "embodied"
reading of the verbal duel, and it will also advance a set of more
global psychological speculations regarding the ephemera of pre-modern
bodily experience.

The Virtual Body

The metaphor of the virtual body hinges on a distinction between
the actual human body and a psychic or imagined body. The virtual body
is related to that of the "corporeal psyche" described by
Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, who retheorizes Freudian
concepts of narcissism and the body ego in her book Volatile Bodies.
This corporeal psyche is an imaginary body, a psychic projection of that
body, though not a point-for-point mapping. It is "something like
an internal screen," Grosz writes, "onto which the illuminated
and projected images of the body's outer surface are directed....
[It] is a representation of the varying intensities of libidinal
investment in the various bodily parts and the body as a whole"
(37). Grosz distinguishes, then, between the actual body and a psychic
version or experience of the body that does and does not correspond to
the actual; it is not, she says, a "veridical diagram or
representation of the empirical and anatomical body; nor is it an effect
of which the body or the body's surface is a cause...."
Rather, she thinks of this reformulated ego as deriving from two kinds
of "surface"--one inside, however a psychic inside might be
imagined, and the other outside, an outside which is equally, and
counter intuitively, perceptual rather than simply real (37). It is, in
a word, imaginary, though it is nevertheless rooted in one's
experience of the world through one's body.

The virtual body is thus not restricted to the configuration of our
"natural" bodies, but is in many ways prosthetic. Grosz
argues, "the 'natural' body, insofar as there is one, is
continually augmented by the products of history and culture, which it
readily incorporates into its own intimate space" (38). Everything
from sunglasses to automobiles and airplanes extends the corporeal
psyche beyond the skin of one's actual body. For her formulation,
Grosz sheds light on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, when
he discusses the human body and its technological supplements:

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or
sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor
power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his
muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ship and
aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by
means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own
eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; by
means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility
set by the structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he
has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual
impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting
auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he
possesses of recollection, his memory.
... Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When
he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent, but
these organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much
trouble at times. (Freud 90-92; Grosz 38-39)

Grosz builds on the idea of the prosthetic ego as imagined by Freud
in order to reformulate the mind/body problem; if the psyche cannot, in
a fundamental sense, be separated from the corporeal, if it represents
itself to itself and to others as contained or bordered by a series of
distorted, highly flexible, and largely fictitious bodies of its own
imagining--bodily fantasies founded, above all, on libidinal investments
or lack thereof in certain body parts--then the mind/body split is no
longer a split. Rather, the dichotomy of mind and body can be
reconceived, Grosz suggests, as a Mobius strip of paradoxically
intermingled and sometimes indistinguishable surfaces and interiors (36
et passim).

Grosz's reconception of the relation of mind and body opens
fields of investigation that are very fruitful for all those interested
in the history of the body. Grosz's psychoanalytic model, though
not itself an historicized approach to either the body or the psyche,
invites one to build on her insights. The early modernist might
evaluate, for example, the impact of certain epidemiological
developments or technological changes (e.g., syphilis or the plague;
guns and artillery, the printing press, modes of contraception) on the
virtual body. When were particular tools or "prostheses," in
the aforementioned Freudian sense, developed; and above all, how did
these changes indelibly mark people's lived and imagined
experiences of their bodies during the early modern period?

Through historical and psychoanalytic study of early modern
fantasies regarding the body, one can move beyond the suggestive yet
general reading of the corporeal psyche sketched by Grosz toward an
understanding of individual imagined bodies and toward an awareness of
certain collective sensibilities within the historical period or culture
under investigation. The corporeal psyche, as Grosz defines it, is an
individual's imagined experience of his or her own body. The
virtual body, in contrast, is a more mobile concept--quite literally, in
that it circulates. The virtual body may move from one person to another
as shared corporeal fantasy, or it may be projected onto a person or
group, or onto inanimate objects (e.g., buildings, ships, or cities).
The virtual body, unlike the ego of classic Freudian theory, is not a
transhistorical entity that exists outside of culture and inside one
person, but a historically, socially, and geographically contingent
projection of personal and also group identity. Though virtual bodies
are fluid and evanescent, they are some extent generalizable--that is
one premise of this essay: that one can posit many virtual bodies for a
given time period. These are often templates of shared bodily anxieties
and fantasies that nevertheless may have varied from person to person.
We shall see several such bodies animating the poetry of Maffio Venier
and Veronica Franco--the imagined bodies of prostitutes, sexual
deviants, amazons, and many others.

The Syphilitic Imaginary

Syphilis had a significant and wide-ranging impact on the available
range of corporeal fantasies in the early modern era. Syphilographers,
early modern and modern alike, have studied the effect of the dreaded
disease on the social, political, and spiritual lives of
sixteenth-century Europeans. In his History of Syphilis, Claude Quetel
traces the vectors of the epidemic, which may have been brought back
from the New World (though historians continue to debate the origins of
the illness), and which seems to have appeared in Italy in 1494, with
the arrival of the mercenary army of Charles VIII of France. Certain of
these soldiers carried syphilis with them, infecting the population with
the virulent disease. In the following year Charles' troops were
demobilized, and soldiers returning home and/or fleeing from the disease
would spread the disease, that quickly became a near-global epidemic
(Quetel 8-16).

Early medical commentators on syphilis, such as Gaspar Torella and
Francisco Lopez de Villalobos, Jacques de Bethencourt, and Girolamo
Fracastoro, detailed the symptoms of the disease, which proved most
virulent in the first decades after its appearance in Europe, and which
became marginally less severe by the end of the sixteenth century. (10)
Their treatises, while not in agreement as to the causes of the disease,
collectively create a portrait of the ravaging symptoms of syphilis on
the body: initially, large, open sores on the genitals, together with a
hardening of the surrounding tissues; terrible pains in the limbs, head,
and neck; ulcerous pox erupting across the body; the loss of hair on the
body; and tertiary damage to the nose, larynx, and bodily organs.

Frequently abandoned by doctors, syphilitics often relied on
surgeons, barbers, or others even less proficient for treatment. This
disastrous cure specified that ointments and frictions of mercury be
applied to the body of the sufferer, and sometimes fumigations of
mercury, as well. Mercury treatments caused one's teeth to fall
out, generated large amounts of foul drool and an ungodly bodily stench.
Mercury treatments could also result in neurological damage, indicated
by symptoms such as shaking and paralysis. Clearly, if the disease did
not kill the patient, the cure was likely to do so (Quetel 28-31,
Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare's England 38).

Perhaps the most significant feature of syphilis, for the purposes
of this argument, was that the disease was increasingly difficult to
hide and, in later stages, was likely to result in disfigurement and
perhaps madness. (11) Syphilitics, associated in the early modern
cultural imaginary with lepers and other pariahs, were at various times
exiled from cities, confined to primitive and barbaric hospitals, and in
other ways marginalized or cast out by those terrified by their illness
and disfigurement.

The blight of syphilis was not, as we know, resolved until
comparatively recent times, with the advent of antibiotics after World
War II. Intriguingly the disappearance of syphilis after its
centuries-long devastation in populations around the world has resulted
in a certain amnesia about its impact on history--and certainly on the
history of the body. Countering that amnesia, Johannes Fabricius has
described the "syphilitic shock" of the Renaissance. Fabricius
argues that European society at the end of the fifteenth century was a
permissive one, and that many individuals at all levels of society
enjoyed a sexual freedom "not realized since antiquity" (17).
If indeed a certain hedonism was the mark of late fifteenth-century
sexual mores in Europe, that freedom would soon be challenged by the
advent of syphilis. Marriage and fidelity would be cherished by
religious reformers, and social critics would denounce prostitution and
promiscuity not only as affronts to moral probity but also as serious
public health threats (19-20).

But if there was an anti-promiscuity, anti-sex backlash in the
sixteenth century, it does not seem to have affected Venetian social
life in any predictable way. Venice saw the establishment of the Spedale
degli Incurabili in the early years of the sixteenth century. (12) The
creation of this hospital for victims of the Mal Francese and other
extreme illnesses demonstrated "the acceptance by the Venetian
government of the necessity and utility of these hospitals not just in
the territory, but also in the capital itself" (Arrizabalaga,
Henderson and French 165). Governmental involvement with and attention
to the mal franciosati is also evident from the records of the Venetian
Sanita, the civic Board of Health (165).

There was, however, a disjunction between the recognition of
syphilis as a public health threat on the one hand, and on the other,
the mentality of tolerance and libertinism for which early modern Venice
was well known, especially regarding prostitution. Renowned throughout
the world for its sex tourism, Venice was home to a vast number of
prostitutes, who constituted up to one tenth of the population at
various times. (13) Prostitution was, perplexingly, a growth industry in
Renaissance Venice, despite the fact that the women involved in this
practice were widely recognized as vectors of the disease and blamed for
its spread. (14) Though married women--especially of the
patriciate--were effectively quarantined in their houses, (15) men were
free to pursue their pleasure as they wished--except, theoretically,
with other men; at this time homosexuality was criminalized in Venice,
though it remained a partly tolerated practice. (16) Sixteenth-century
Venetian notions of gender morality were, as Satya Datta has suggested,
"a peculiar blend of puritanism (afflicting only women in the
family) and permissiveness (for men and certain groups of women)."
(17) One could interpret the sequestering of wives as evidence of a
desire to control women's sexuality and an obnoxious double
standard, which undoubtedly it was, as well as an attempt to preserve
families from the contamination of sexually transmitted diseases. If
that is the case, then that sequestering also suggests secrecy or even
denial--a shared state of non-recognition, a collective fantasy of
bodily invulnerability in the face of very high odds of disease and/or
mortality. Or perhaps it demonstrated a resignation at the inevitability
of both.

Although she does not talk about denial per se, Anna Foa points out
the difficulties in representing syphilis in sixteenth-century Venice.
She argues that syphilis lacked an iconography of its own, and
consequently drew on that of leprosy: "It was as if Christian
society had already dealt with its fear of sex by symbolizing it in
leprosy. Society, then, had virtually used up its metaphorical
capacities.... Syphilis, specifically tied to sexual intercourse with
Renaissance prostitutes, never assumed the symbolic status of a
sickness/evil at the same level as leprosy--the punishment of embraces
only dreamed and feared" (Foa 38).

It should also be noted that by the mid-sixteenth century, the
effects of the disease seemed less virulent than they had at the onset
of the epidemic over a half-century earlier. As one celebrated
doctor-historian, Girolamo Rossi, wrote in his Storia di Ravenna, first
published in 1572, the symptoms of the disease seemed much mitigated in
his own time, a fact that he attributed either to astrological
realignments or the discovery of remedies. (18) Habitual denial mingled
with hope in the possibility of a cure, or at least in the available
programs for treatment. In any case, prostitution in Venice remained one
of the principal attractions of the city, for countless foreigners and
natives alike, and syphilis remained, paradoxically, a secret malady.
(19)

Maffio Contra Veronica: We find in the poems of Maffio Venier
written against Veronica Franco some interesting representations of, and
fantasies about, prostitution, as well as syphilis. Franca, credeme,
che, per San Maffio [Believe Me, Franca, That by Saint Maffio], the
first and least offensive poem in the series of three about Veronica
Franco, gives a clue in its title to the poet's identity. However,
it is likely that Veronica was uncertain about who had authored the
capitolo, supposing her lover Marco Venier wrote it, rather than his
cousin Maffio (Dazzi 27, 46; Jones and Rosenthal 17). The speaker
declares his desire for Franco, yet complains about her high fees:

Maffio praises her good looks and presentation, but states that she
is not worth the price:

No perche vu no sie bella e pulia
Cara, dolce, gentile costuma,
Ma perche mi ho st'umor, sta bizaria:
Me tagiarave el cazzo, e, despera,
De sti cogioni faria una fortagia,
Co' pagasse una volta, co' ho chiava. (Dazzi 23-24)
[It's not because you're not beautiful and polished, / Lovely,
sweet, kind and well-mannered, / But because I have this humor,
this eccentricity: // I would cut off my member, and in despair /
Have my balls made into an omelette / If I were ever to pay the
person I screwed.]

The poet's "bizaria," his "eccentricity,"
arises from his desire to preserve his own bodily integrity, which he
envisions as graphically undone--by himself--if he were to trade money
for sex. To hire a courtesan would be tantamount to doing violence to
his own masculinity.

Masculinity may be also at stake in another stanza of the poem:

Se paga le puttane de bordello
Che a tutti i muodi se fa bisegar
E spesso ha falla buso e a manganello. (Dazzi 26)
[Whores in brothels get paid / For doing it every which way / Often
mistaking the bore for the artillery.]

Almost in passing, Maffio hints at the "sexual deviance"
of prostitutes and of the men who frequent them. How exactly that might
work he leaves to the imagination. It should be noted, however, that
while prostitution was tolerated in Renaissance Venice, certain forms of
intercourse were not. Sodomy between men and women, or between men and
men, was, for example, stigmatized and sometimes severely punished
(Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros 109-45). It is not clear, however, whether
Maffio implies a specific sexual act by "ha falla buso e a
manganello'; he could also be referring to female dominance, sexual
or otherwise. Franco, though a courtesan rather than a common
prostitute, leaves herself open to such charges of deviance by charging
for her services, as does her clientele.

In the second poem in the series, An fia, comodo? Ache muodo
ziogheno? [Wouldn't you like that? How should we play?], Maffio
launches a deeply ad feminam attack. Each part of Veronica's body
is profoundly ugly, wasted, destroyed:

Se dise co' una in ossi xe reduhta
Chela somegia Veronica Franca,
Che no ghe xe de ti la piu destrutta. (Dazzi 31)
[They say that reduced to her very bones / she resembles
Veronica Franco, / and that no one is more destroyed that
she is.]

As Margaret Rosenthal notes, the poem offers an anti-blazon
describing infected and horrific body parts (Honest Courtesan 56). This
attack on Franco also contrasts with and undermines the blazons by male
lovers that were written to Franco and that she included in her
publication of the Terze rime, perhaps to counteract the damage done by
Maffio. What is striking about this second in the series of three poems
attacking Franco is that here he switches from an attack on her practice
to an attack on her body, suggesting that it is wasted by age and
disease.

It is the third and last poem, however, that presents the most
extreme images of Veronica's body. Veronica, ver unica puttana
describes a syphilitic "mostro in carne umana" [monster in
human flesh, Dazzi 37]. Maffio's virtual Veronica, the
"adopted daughter of the French disease," sends so many men to
the hospitals that these institutions send her gift baskets at Easter
and Christmas:

Pocky, stinky, encrusted with boils that she picks and sells for
fertilizer, Veronica is a one-woman "guerra contra la sanita"
[a war against public health] and a "[m]are del morbo" [a sea
of pestilence]. Maffio has gone from complaining about her high fees in
the first poem to attempting to destroy her business and her reputation
with a syphilo-gynephobic tirade.

Maffio imagines alternately the corrupted exterior and the
frightening interior spaces of Veronica's body. Her external body
is a frightening spectacle and a public nuisance; her interior is a
public space, an open grave into which hapless men may find themselves
buried. With unabashed, folkloric gynephobia, Maffio recounts the story
of a certain client from Treviso who met his end when accidentally
suffocated by one of Veronica's pendulous breasts. To hide the
deed, she buries the man inside her body. (22) In another tercet, her
box is bigger than a boat; her anus bigger than a washtub; she is the
queen of the bordello:

What is interesting about this poem, if we may call it that, is
that Veronica's virtual body expands in Maffio's fantasy far
beyond the borders of her physical frame. Sometimes immense and
engulfing, other times diffuse and formless, she threatens to
contaminate her neighborhood and indeed the city "con el putrefar
l'aer d'intorno" [by putrifying the atmosphere, Dazzi
40]. With that line and others Maffio compares Veronica to the plague,
which, in fact, would claim one quarter of the population of Venice
between the years 1575-1577. (23) It is worth noting that Maffio's
verse and Veronica's edition of the Terze rime would have been
circulated and/or published shortly after the onset of the plague in the
fall of 1575. Veronica is "el summario d'ogni malattia":
syphilis, plague, leprosy, and every other disease, for that matter
(Dazzi 40). Alas, there exists no remedy--"no val recetta / Ne
medesina eletta" to defend against the contagion she spreads (Dazzi
39).

The poem ends strangely. The speaker calls Veronica a cliff
("un precipitio"), a depth ("un profondo"), an abyss
("un'abisso"), and a chaos ("un chaos") (Dazzi
40). Though Maffio claims mastery over his subject matter,
Veronica's body, he seems dwarfed by the abyss, the chaos, that
threatens to engulf him. Veronica's malignant force is far greater
than his own, and that is the problem and irony of the poem.

The poem Veronica, ver unica puttana must have elicited a
complicated response from its audience. The speaker forces his listeners
or readers to confront the reality of syphilis, as well as plague and
other diseases, while enabling them to envision that threat as contained
within the virtual body of a scapegoat. The poem does not contain that
threat, but implicitly requires the containment or exile of the source
of contagion. Most likely these repulsive images of Veronica Franco
inspired not only laughter, but also fear or dread, among members of her
coterie.

It is also possible that the largely male audience of Domenico
Venier's salon may well have identified with the reviled body of
the courtesan--at least on some level--while consciously maintaining a
psychological and emotional distance from a pollution that was, after
all, confined to prostitutes--or so they might have wished.

Veronica contra Maffio: Veronica herself was called upon for a
rebuttal. Interestingly, nowhere in Franco's replies to Maffio
Venier does she deny that she has syphilis. As noted below, the evidence
for her illness is inconclusive, though suggestive. But regardless of
whether she did or did not suffer from that professional hazard, her
virtual counterpart did. In other words, the abject body in
Venier's poems had a life and reality of its own, tapping into the
syphilitic imaginary of the culture. Franco chooses not to address her
virtual counterpart directly, but rather to envision an alternative body
for herself and for her audience. The body she portrays is healthy,
beautiful, and exceedingly strong.

voglio, prima ch'io giunga al trar de l'armi,
il mio parer communicar con voi,
e con voi primamente consigliarmi;
e se determinato fia tra noi
che con gli effetti io debba risentirmi,
non saro pigra a pigliar l'armi poi. (232-33)
[I want before I come to pull out weapons, / to communicate
my opinion to you / and above all to ask you for counsel, /
and if between us we should decide / that I should express my
resentment in deeds, / then I won't hesitate to take up arms.]

In this poem, the duel in question is fantasized as physical,
rather than verbal; Veronica imagines doing violence--even killing--her
adversary. However, she is not sure that she wants to "bruttar di
quel sangue queste mani, / ch'e di malizia e di viltate
infetto" (240-41; [soil] these hands of mine with that blood, /
infected with malice and cowardice both). (25) Significantly, she
imagines taking on the masculine role of duelist or warrior, though she
seeks the permission of her male patron while doing so.

Franco's most pointed response to Maffio, entitled
D'ardito cavalier non e prodezza [It is not a brave knight's
gallant deed], appears as Capitolo XVI of the Rime. She opens by
claiming the moral high ground. The author of the scurrilous poems has
acted in an ungallant fashion by dealing "gravi colpi di mortal
ferute" [blows that meant her death] to Veronica, an unarmed woman
(160-61). Many times he has struck her naked female breast
("feminil petto ignudo"), and pulled his bloody weapons out of
her side. (26) He wounds her so gravely that she is uncertain of her
survival.

Veronica emphasizes her extreme vulnerability, only to point out
that her vulnerability has diminished: "quella piaga acerba
s'e saldata" (160-61; the bitter wound has finally healed).
Her infected wound has healed, thanks to bitter medicines and the power
of steel and fire:

Here she indirectly counters Maffio's depiction of her as a
scabby and infected mess by presenting an alternative virtual body that
is healthy, strong, and no longer wounded. What wounds there were had
been caused not by disease, but by one vindictive man.

This virtual Veronica only looks "moll[e] and delicat[a]"
[tender and delicate]. She presents the seductive, feminine qualities of
her body, while simultaneously emphasizing her will to combat with
Maffio. She has studied the art of arms and is now prepared to do battle
with the cowardly poet:

Diberti Leigh remarks that Franco presents herself as a heroine
worthy of Ariosto or Tasso (162), though she quickly clarifies that her
weapons are really words, not swords. Likewise Rosenthal notes that in
the ten-zone "wordplay is her weapon in the struggle for dominance
over her accuser" (Honest Courtesan 180). Virtually speaking, words
are swords with which the phallic and now invulnerable Veronica will cut
down the virtual Maffio, whose manhood is under attack.

Specifically she charges him with a lack of interest in the female
sex:

In homophobic Venice, Franco's reference to her
adversary's "mal uso" was a blow that Maffio may have
felt sharply. In this way Veronica attempts to turn the tables, probably
in an effort to make him the audience's scapegoat.

Much has been made of the conclusion of Capitolo XVI, in which
Veronica alludes to her attacker's poem and attempts to commandeer it. She does not, in fact, go beyond Maffio's first line, sticking
with the phrase "ver unica" [verily unique].

To sum up her argument, Maffio doesn't speak proper Venetian,
or he wouldn't misuse the word "unique," which is
actually an appropriate epithet for a woman such as herself--a woman of
fame, beauty, glory and virtue.

This virtual body is not only virtuous, but in some sense private,
as well. If Maffio had insisted that Veronica Franco's body was a
public body, as well as a space open to the public, Veronica withdraws
her virtual self from the public sphere--the streets of Venice--and
places it within a quasi-mythological setting, out of time and history.
Moreover, Franco represents the exterior of her body only, closing its
interior spaces to public view. This Veronica, of fixed rather than
floating dimensions, impenetrable and inviolable, offers a striking
contrast to Maffio's version. The Veronica of his third poem was
described as having "nessuna parte intrega" [no whole part,
Dazzi 39]. This Veronica has integrity in the moral, and especially in
the physical sense. Her body is discreet, whole, strong, defended, and
autonomous. In a sense, she embodies the Renaissance self as some today
would imagine it: an individual free to control her own destiny.

This was a complicated assertion of female subjectivity and
authority in the male space of Domenico Venier's academy. In making
this assertion, Veronica sought to negotiate the ambivalent desire or
outright hostility directed toward her, asserting control over the
representation of her own public-private body. Interestingly, she
accepts the epithet of prostitute ("meretrice") that Maffio
has applied to her, rather than insisting on the higher status label
cortigiana. However, she imagines that Maffio has redefined the label
through "unica."

Unica implies, in other words, that prostitutes are, or can be,
good, gracious, and kind; by turning Maffio's words against him,
she attempts to replace one virtual body with another. It is highly
significant that in these stanzas Veronica identifies with other women
of her trade-those who have "some goodness"--an identification
to which I shall return later on in this essay.

She closes by challenging her adversary to another verbal duel and
threatens: "Voi non avrete incontro a me refugio" [You will
have nowhere to run from me, 170-71]. She offers him peace, but only on
the condition that he leaves off his attacks. It appears, in fact, that
he did, for we have no record of any further attacks by Maffio contra
Veronica.

The Outcome: Who won this contest of words? Though we cannot answer
this question with any certainty, the answer must certainly have
depended on the persuasive force of competing virtual Veronicas. Would
the audience have been more unsettled by a representation of a
syphilitic prostitute or by a woman warrior thrashing a man not inclined
to women? Was the image of a polluted monster more powerful than that of
a phallic amazon--or vice versa? One might imagine that the
identifications of the audience members at the Ca' Venier moved in
sometimes contradictory directions.

I have already suggested that they would not have been
disinterested spectators of a humorous quarrel. They may have
participated in the jokes made at Veronica's expense, if in fact
they knew from the beginning who had written the poems and protected the
author's identity with their silence. But Maffio's attacks,
though targeting Veronica, might well have been felt by most of the men
in the salon--those who had slept with Veronica or with any other
courtesan, or with any woman or man. The virtual Veronica of
Maffio's third poem may well have posed a psychological threat to
the entire audience, to the extent that they were confronted with the
specter of disease and mortality-Veronica's, as well as their
own--and by the indisputable link between sex and death in Venice.

In truth, both poems, both sets of corporeal images, were comic and
grotesque, appealing and unappealing. The syphilitic imaginary was a
space that men might like to visit, but not for long and mainly for
laughs. One might say the same about Franco's stylized fantasy of
male-female armed combat. The depiction of Veronica as virtual amazon
may have facilitated her audience's denial of the deeply unpleasant
reality of syphilis. However, in order to engage that fantasy of
corporeal invulnerability, they would have had to identify with a female
virtual body. This was Veronica's subversive challenge to her
audience, as well as her attempt to salvage her reputation and career.

In an interesting case of "what goes around comes
around," Maffio Venier, like thousands of his countrymen,
contracted syphilis (reputedly in Constantinople, in 1580) and died from
it in 1586 at the reasonably early age of 36 (Rosenthal 49). He did not
ultimately prosper in his career as a poet or a prelate (Rosenthal
49-50).

It is highly likely that Veronica, like her nemesis Maffio, was
also afflicted with syphilis. Certainly this was the one of the key
risks of her profession, as she notes in a letter to a woman about to
prostitute her own daughter. To join the ranks of the oldest profession,
in Veronica's eyes, was to "[rush] toward the shipwreck of
your mind and your body," as she so candidly stated to the unnamed
recipient of that letter:

It's a most wretched thing, contrary to human reason, to
subject one's body and labor to a slavery terrifying even to
think of. To make oneself prey to so many men, at the risk of
being stripped, robbed, even killed so that one man, one day,
may snatch away from you everything you've acquired from many
over such a long time, along with so many other dangers of
injury and dreadful contagious diseases; to eat with another's
mouth, sleep with another's eyes, move according to another's will,
obviously rushing toward the shipwreck of your mind and your
body--what greater misery? What wealth, what luxuries, what
delights can outweigh all this? Believe me among all the world's
calamities this is the worst. And if to worldly concerns you add
those of the soul, what greater doom and certainty of damnation
could there be? (Poems and Selected Letters 39) (28)

There is, in sum, nothing to recommend the career of a courtesan.
No amount of money can offset the damage afflicted on a woman's
body, as well as her psyche. The author speaks as one who knows.

In the undated Familiar Letter 44, Veronica asks her patron
Domenico Venier, uncle to the hated Maffio, for the use of a wheelchair.
She claims to have hurt her knee by piercing it with a hair pin,
creating an injury that has nearly caused the loss of her leg. (29) In
its later stages, syphilis begins to eat away at the bones of the body,
especially at the knees or on the tibia, and often causes excruciating
stabbing pains. Perhaps Veronica's reference to being pierced with
a needle was a metaphoric description of her illness--what she felt,
rather than what actually happened to her. Though it is difficult to
determine from this letter the true nature of her malady, Veronica may
be describing obliquely the symptoms of secondary or tertiary syphilis.

Veronica's literary and economic fortunes may also have waned
after this controversy, though the evidence is ambiguous and difficult
to interpret. Arguably she was at the zenith of her career in 1575, the
year that witnessed some portion of this debate, the publication of her
Rime and a collection of poems that she edited, and the onset of the
plague in Venice. In 1580 she published an edition of her letters and
also battled the Inquistion. (30) She seems to have left her
profession(s) at about that time. By 1582 she was impoverished and seems
to have remained so until the time of her death in 1591 (Rosenthal 176).
The tenzone may well have represented the turning point in her career.

As for the audience of the tenzone, the spectators at the Ca'
Venier, their voyage into the cultural imaginary of the verbal duel was
ostensibly brief. These spectators could and probably did retreat into
the safety of their own imagined health and well-being, away from the
liminal figures who fought a verbal/virtual battle in the Ca'
Venier. However, such fantasies of corporeal security could not have
been sustained for long; the plague, a cure for habitual denial, brought
Venice back to reality in that very year.

Veronica and Maffio's conflict faded into the background as
this much larger drama took center stage. Yet the virtual bodies they
created would remain emblematic of their century. Maffio imagined a
virtual scapegoat for all bodily anxieties--especially syphilis--to be
abjected by Venier's circle of writers and intellectuals, and by
Venice in general. Veronica's response took the form of an
androgynous, erotic, and invulnerable virtual body designed for maximum
freedom and autonomy. Incompatible and mutually exclusive, these
competing visions of the corporeal attest to the unresolved social and
psychological conflicts within the hedonistic culture that entertained
these fantasies.

Coda

As modern readers of the tenzone, we seek to understand not only
the individual circumstances that led to this conflict, but also the
collective mentalities from which it emerged. Increasingly, historians
and psychologists are willing to set aside the notion of "an
ahistorical and universal psychic reality" (31) in favor of a
hermeneutics of the mind that allows for differences and variations, as
well as constants and continuities, in the structures of human mental
life across temporal and geographic distances. A great deal more work
will be required in order to understand this changing paradigm more
fully as it applies to the early modern period. Hence the conclusions I
shall draw here are necessarily speculative. (32)

In this essay I have explored paired sets of fantasies that were
circulated or performed before the members of the Ca' Venier. I
have argued that the tenzone was not just a power struggle between two
rivals seeking status within their group, each at the expense of the
other; rather, their conflict was one in which the audience, as well as
the performers, had a stake. Modern readers may have a stake in the
argument, as well, though not necessarily for the same reasons. Certain
features of that argument were specific to the cultural milieu of
Cinquecento Venice, and it is those differences that I highlight next.
There are many variables in that equation, many factors that helped form
the social and psychological backdrop for these literary expressions.
Three significant and interconnected contexts are the following: 1) the
outpouring of eros represented by the vast sex trade of the Republic,
manifested in the visual arts, (33) in clothing, and in other material
aspects of culture, and refracted as the Venetian ethos of social
tolerance or libertinism; 2) the sequestration of women, especially of
the patriciate, in their homes, and the exclusion of virtually all women
from public life; and 3) the blight of syphilis, which linked eros and
thanatos in the cultural imaginary in new ways, and which was
simultaneously conflated with other, more devastating plagues--especially the Black Death. These three contexts help shed
light on the social organization of that city in the sixteenth century,
revealing the particular vulnerability, the vibrancy, and also violence
of that culture. This violence was the obverse of libertinism--namely,
its fear, repression, and the assignation of blame. The emergence of a
terrifying disease directly linked to sexuality generated a reactionary
pressure to control, to scapegoat, to blame--precisely as a means of
containing a threat that could not be cured, contained or fully
understood.

The desire to ascribe blame to a person or group for the spread of
a disease was, of course, not unique to the syphilis epidemic of the
early modern era. Susan Sontag has analyzed the metaphors that attach to
certain maladies, highlighting continuities, as well as dissimilarities,
in the representations of various plagues:

The most feared diseases, those that are not simply fatal but
transform the body into something alienating, like leprosy and
syphilis and cholera and (in the imagination of many) cancer,
are the ones that seem particularly susceptible to promotion
to "plague." Leprosy and syphilis were the first illnesses to
be consistently described as repulsive. It was syphilis that,
in the earliest descriptions by doctors at the end of the
fifteenth century, generated a version of the metaphors that
flourish around AIDS: of a disease that was not only repulsive
and retributive but collectively invasive. (Sontag 45-46)

Repulsive, retributive, and invasive are qualifiers not only of
these diseases, but also of the bodies that carry them. We can observe
these metaphors operating in Maffio Venier's projections of a
virtual Veronica, laden with multiple plagues and contaminating in the
extreme, a vehicle for the collective fears of that time and place. But
which was the greater plague for Maffio? Was it a lethal and corrosive
physical illness, which he pinned on Veronica Franco, a convenient and
proximate scapegoat? Or was the illness Veronica herself, a public woman
contaminating a male public space with her presence--in which case
syphilis and other plagues served as metaphors for the threat posed by
Veronica Franco, figured as an embodiment of lethal alterity that Maffio
sought to abject from the domain of the Ca' Venier.

Feminist critics from Joan Kelly forward have questioned whether
women had a Renaissance, observing that the suppression or exclusion of
women seemed to have been on the up swing in the sixteenth century. (34)
The syphilis epidemic was but one variable--yet a significant one--in
this complicated and perplexing equation of early modern misogyny. In my
reading of the tenzone, the gynephobia of Maffio's poem was not
random misogyny, but the distillation of a heightened sense of male
vulnerability particular to that historical moment, as well as to Maffio
himself.

Undoubtedly that same historical moment also produced a heightened
and differential sense of female vulnerability. Veronica Franco coped
with the general economic, social, physical, and psychological risks of
her life as a courtesan, as well as the specific vulnerability induced
by Maffio Venier's aggression toward her, in a variety of ways. One
strategy was to resist Maffio's abjection by embracing it. In
assuming the derisive epithet "meretrice" in Capitolo XVI,
Veronica Franco offered a radical performance of her gendered
subjectivity. By accepting that title, she also identified, at least to
a point, with a large caste of female sex workers I the thousands of
ordinary prostitutes from whom Franco had, as a cortigiana honesta,
built a career out of distinguishing herself. (35) Maffio Venier's
vicious attacks provided her the opportunity, painful as it must have
been, for a more visible mode of "coming out" as a public
woman--i.e., as a prostitute and as a woman writer. We might compare her
self-assertion to that of gay activists in the early years of the AIDS
epidemic--those who reappropriated the term "queer" as their
epithet; in doing so, they too laid claim to public space. A certain
"meretricious" female subjectivity in the Renaissance, (36)
like queer subjectivity later on, may have solidified, slowly but
surely, as a direct and differential response to the blame placed upon
it. That is to say, a new model of public female agency began to
crystallize during the early modern era around the combinate notions of
sexual deviance and defiance, and around a set of corporeal
vulnerabilities, real and imagined. Of a highly particular intersection
of desire and fear I have attempted a reconstruction, while also
proposing that we view this strange crossing as a microcosm of much
larger forces of social and psychological change. It is by recognizing
the body as the locus of such changes, and the battleground, that we can
arrive at a deeper engagement with this history.

WORKS CITED

Arrizabalaga, Jon, John Henderson, and Roger French. The Great Pox:
The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.

--. "Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist's
Perspective." Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study
of Society and Culture. Ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1999. 241-80.

Eibenstein-Alvisi, Irene. "Dialoguing with the Past: Veronica
Franco and her Modern Readers." The Dialogic Construction of Women
in the Italian Renaissance. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell
University, August 2003.

* I would like to thank Marilyn Migiel and Irene Eibenstein-Alvisi,
as well as my editor and readers of Italica, for their help and
suggestions for this essay. Students of my "Did Women Have a
Renaissance" graduate seminar at the University of Texas at Austin
provided valuable feedback. Finally, a K. Garth Huston and Fletcher
Jones Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library in San Marino,
California, enabled me to conduct some of my research for this essay. To
all of you I express my gratitude.

(1) This growing interest in the body is partly the effect of
Foucault's body-oriented critiques of power, from Folie et deraison
(1961; Madness and Civilization) to Surveiller et punir (1975;
Discipline and Punish), and Histoire de la sexualite (1976; History of
Sexuality), to name but a few. As Elam has noted, "One of the more
striking events in recent critical discourse, especially in the field of
Renaissance drama, has been the shift from a primary concern with
'language' to a primary concern with the body.... The reaction
against the linguist turn and its prophylactic sterilizing of the body
has been what we might term the corporeal turn, which has shifted
attention from the word to the flesh, from the semantic to the somatic;
or rather has insisted on the priority of the somatic over the
semantic" (142-43).

(2) Consider, for example, the post-structuralist, post-Lacanian
philosophy of Grosz, as well as Haraway's denaturings of the human
body in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women and Stone's provocative study
of virtual reality in The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of
the Mechanical Age.

(3) Recent examples of such hybrid theorizing would be The Body in
Parts, edited by Hillman and Mazzio; Bynum's Fragmentation and
Redemption, and Sawday's The Body Emblazoned.

(4) I am indebted to Bynum's essay, "Why All the Fuss
about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective," for her insights
into the sources of contemporary corporeal anxieties and of body studies
criticism, as well as her analysis of certain continuities between the
corporeal identity crises of the past and of the present. The
contemporary denaturalization of the body, witnessed in innovations such
as cloning and genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics, and
virtual reality and the Net, calls into question the very idea of the
human. Corporeal identity has never been more ambiguous, but that is the
subject for another essay.

(5) Veronica's fame as a courtesan and as a poet and
personality extended well outside of Venice. When Henry III of France visited the city in 1574, he made a point of spending a night with her.
As Malpezzi Price writes, "The enjoyment of her company became the
climax of the king's Venetian stay, and Franco's body became
the personification of Venetian beauty and hospitality" (84).

(6) It is difficult to know when these poems by Maffio Venier were
written, and likewise Franco's responses to them. In Veronica
Franco, editors Jones and Rosenthal place the debate in the 1570s (15).
In The Honest Courtesan, Rosenthal states that Maffio's satirical
verses against Franco began circulating in Venetian literary circles in
1575, and that they were written in that same year (49, 51). I am
inclined to concur with the more precise dating.

(7) Domenico Venier's salon began to develop in the 1530s. It
included at various times literati such Girolamo Molino (1500-1569),
Federigo Badoer (1518-1593), Sperone Speroni (1500-1588), and many
others. The composer Parabosco was also affiliated with the group. See
Feldman, "The Academy of Domenico Venier," 477-80. Domenico
was also a renowned patron of female literary talent. His proteges
included Moderata Fonte, Irene di Spilimbergo, Gaspara Stampa, Tullia
d'Aragona, and Veronica Gambara (Rosenthal, Honest Courtesan 89).

(8) Interestingly, the academy at the Ca' Venier, though
renowned for the sophistication of its literary discussions, also
celebrated bawdy or obscene poetry and songs in dialect. Maffio's
work would be a sample of such, and Domenico himself seems to have
written risque verses in dialect. As Feldman writes, "This eager
simultaneous accommodation of two such opposed stylistic levels, high
and low, may seem to us paradoxical; but it was not so in the world of
Renaissance styles and conventions, epitomized by the Venetians'
practical-minded acceptance of such contradictory modes and their
arduous attempts to explain and order them by appeal to Cicero"
(497-98).

(11) The noted sixteenth-century army physician Ambroise Pare
documented how late-stage syphilitics might look: "For some lose
one of their eyes, others both. Some lose a great portion of the
eyelids, othersome look very ghastly.... Some lose their hearing, others
have their noses fall flat, the palate of their mouth perforated with
the loss of the bone.... Some have their mouths drawn awry, others their
yards cut off, and women a great part of their privities tainted with
corruption.... It fairs far worse with these, who have all their bodies
deformed by a leprosy arising there-hence, and have all their throttles
and throats eaten with putrid and cancerous ulcers, their hair falling
off from their heads, their hands and feet cleft with tetters and scaly chinks" ("Of the lues venerea," The Works of That Famous
Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London: 1649) 465;
spellings and punctuation modernized).

(12) The Incurabili was said to be founded by two noblewomen, Maria
Malipiera Malipiero and Marina Grimani, in 1522. Within two years of its
establishment, it housed eighty individuals, including its staff. The
hospital was greatly expanded between 1572 and 1591, with separate wards
for men and women (Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French 165, 179-83).

(13) This estimate, perhaps inflated, is based on reports by the
diarist Marino Sanuto and the Catholic-Reformist preacher Fra Bernardino
da Siena, who claim that 10,000 to 12,000 prostitutes lived in Venice at
the beginning of the century, more than one-tenth of the population. See
Lawner 14 and Rosenthal, Honest Courtesan 11.

(14) Winfried Schleiner, among others, has noted that women, rather
than men, were blamed for spreading the disease, though female virgins
were also thought by some to have the ability to cure the
disease--through intercourse.

(16) On Venetian views regarding male homosexuality, see, e.g.,
Lawner 16-17, Rosenthal, Honest Courtesan 23-24, and especially Ruggiero
109-45). Despite the stigma and penalties attached to sodomy, bordellos
for male-male erotic liaisons opened in Cinquecento Venice. One
historian has suggested that such sexual practices were viewed by some
as less risky than those involving women, precisely because females,
especially female prostitutes, were considered to be spreaders of the
disease. See Corradi 29-30.

(17) Datta writes that "the equilibrium attained perhaps
indicates why Venice won itself an international reputation for
nurturing openness and tolerance at the social level" (179).

(19) This phrase I take from a book of the same title, which argues
that venereal disease existed in epidemic proportions in
eighteenth-century Britain and France, "yet it was the great secret
malady of the time" (Merians 1).

(21) The catalogue, which exists in ms. (ca. 1564), gives a price
index for "tutte le principal et piu honorate cortigiane di
Venetia." The most anyone charged at that time was 30 scudi
(Paulina Filla), followed by the 25 scudi fee of Livia Azalina,
"princess of all the courtesans of Venice." At that stage in
her career, which was quite early, Veronica charged 2 scudi, as did her
mother (Masson 153 and Diberti Leigh 17ff).

(23) preto 124. Some 40,000 people died in this epidemic, wreaking
havoc on the Venetian economy (Malpezzi Price 67).

(24) All quotations and translations of Franco's poems have
been drawn from the recent bilingual edition, Veronica Franco: Poems and
Selected Letters, ed. Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal.

(25) Poems and Selected Letters 240-41. Dazzi, in his edition of
Maffio's poems contra Veronica, assumes that Capitolo XXIII is her
final response to Maffio, which it may be. Interestingly, Dazzi refers
to the "sangue infetto di malattia e di vilta" with which
Veronica does not want to dirty her hands (47). If his reading is
correct, Veronica is accusing Maffio of having an illness.

(26) As Migiel has suggested in a conversation, Veronica may be
positioning herself as Christ, the ultimate innocent victim.

(27) Interestingly, Veronica uses the polite form of address with
her adversary ("voi"), suggesting that she is not stooping to
his level or acknowledging familiarity.

(28) In Letter 22 Franco urges a mother not to enter her daughter
into the profession, partly on the grounds that courtesans were at risk
of contracting terrible contagious diseases. Though she does not
directly claim to have experienced this problem herself, she urges the
mother in the strongest possible terms not to exploit her own child.

(29) Fortune favors me by giving me an ailment of the limbs similar
to your Lordship's, having made me almost lose a leg, as if nature
and art were opposed and unwilling to make me resemble you in spirit and
intellect. May the wound to my body make up for the weakness of my
spirit! A welcome offense, since in addition to imitating your
Lordship's indisposition in this way I'll also enjoy some of
your esteemed cast-offs in my need--for example, on of those wheelchairs
of yours, which I beg you to send me by the bearer of this letter, so
that I may profit from it in the unlucky accident to my knee, which
muscle I've pieced, I don't know how, with a hair pin. And
this has kept me from coming to pay you my responses in person, which I
constantly do in my heart" (Letter 44, Poems and Selected Letters
44). In this puzzling and intriguing letter, Veronica identifies her
ailment with Domenico's, yet says that the injury has been caused
by a hair pin (or, in an alternate translation, embroidery needle). She
seems to be talking about something other than a topical injury with a
sharp instrument.

(30) Accused of sorcery and public prostitution by the disgruntled tutor of her children--a man who may also have been a thief in her
household, Veronica was summoned before the Inquisition. Vannitelli, the
tutor, urged the Inquisition to punish her severely, so that "non
infetti piu questa Citta" [so that she may no longer contaminate
this city]. See the chapter on Veronica's Inquisition trial in
Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan 153ff. Since there was no official
sentence handed down at this trial, the hearings may have been
suspended.

(31) As Davoine and Gaudilliere have argued, "The constant
changes of scale and the temporal paradoxes we encounter in the examples
we give imply precisely that they are located with the greatest
exactitude in history, space, and time" (xxvii).

(32) Readers may be perplexed by my rhetoric of "perhaps"
and "it may be that" throughout the essay. It is my belief
that such conclusions, even concerning our own mentalities, are not and
cannot be definitive; rather, they are narratives we construct in order
to explain the mysteries of the psyche. Are we asymptotically
approaching an authentic explanation of the phenomena of mental life
through the various discourses available to us--cognitive psychology,
neuroscience, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy,
sociology and dynamical systems theory, psychoanalysis, history, and/or
literary theory? Perhaps. A fairly recent overview of the state of and
relation between some of these fields--cognitive psychology,
neuroscience, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy--can
be found in The Embodied Mind, by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. This book
is of great interest to me, a literary critic, since 1) I am removed
from each of these fields or discourses and find them quite provocative,
and 2) the authors appear to have no use whatsoever for information
about the mind that might be provided by the discourses of the
humanities (unless philosophy counts itself as one of the humanities).
This is, in my opinion, a problem for further discussion.

(34) There is a vast amount of feminist scholarship on the question
of whether women had a Renaissance, but particularly germane to the
question in an Italian context is the essay collection Refiguring Woman,
ed. Migiel and Schiesari.

(35) Jones and Rosenthal note that meretrice was a comparatively
neutral word in sixteenth-century Venice, close to the English word
prostitute, and having little of the force of puttana, or whore.
"Cortigiana--'courtesan'--had a different meaning. It was
derived from cortigiano, meaning a man who served at court, so it had
connotations of splendor and technical or at least bureaucratic
expertise. The addition of onesta meant 'honored' rather than
'honest,' that is, privileged, wealthy, recognized"
(2-3). When Maffio calls Veronica "meretrice," its force is
not neutral, but an insult, exposing her pretensions of being someone
better or more powerful that she is.

(36) The problem and paradox of being a woman on the public stage
during the Renaissance--whether she was the Queen of England or a lady
fish-monger--was that the stigma of the meretricious was always awaiting
her.

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